Tuesday, May 25, 2004

It's one of the stock science-fiction nightmares, from dystopian
futures where massive populations are ground under the heel of an
unfeeling bureaucracy, stamped, filed, numbered, and cut down if they
get out of line: people getting chips implanted, broadcasting their
identities to hidden equipment that they might not even be aware of.

3 Comments:

Don't take this system's future for granted. It has competition, after all -- GPS-enabled cell phones effectively broadcast the identity and position of the person carrying them at a much greater range, to existing centralized systems. And many, many people are carrying them right now.

It'll be interesting to see how this works out, and if any of the nastier scenarios come to pass. Fortunately, about the worst that can happen here is a humongous bar tab.

One of the problems with things like Britan's national ID cards or the cellphone GPS locators is that they're all- or- nothing affairs, and politicos have a lot of moral investment in them. Even if they're absolute disasters, nothing will be done because Somebody would have to admit that they'd made a mistake.

This way, we have a nice small "pilot project". If it doesn't work, nobody's lost much.